SIX A DAY, SOBER FOR CHAMPION GLORY & P. MULLINS, AS MUCH A GENIUS AS HIS FATHER.

It does not take a great man or greater woman to realise that there are just too many race meetings per year in Britain. I am neither a great man nor an even greater woman, so you will not be surprised to hear that I believe there is a compromise to be found between the stubbornness of the racecourses in wanting as many race-meetings as they can get and the less selfish majority who witness on a daily basis that comeptitiveness is being affected by too many race-meetings.

When I was a much younger individual, growing up in Bristol, a city without a racecourse, a typical racecard comprised six-races, except when races were divided. I vaguely recall a race-meeting at Hereford that had 12 or 14-races due to the novice hurdle being vastly over-subscribed. But mainly it was six-races. Of course, there was no all-weather racing back then; the main cause, I believe, of the present predicament.

If every meeting, with the exception of the major meetings, were restricted to six-races, there would be no need to cut the number of race-meetings as competition will increase due to the lack of alternative races. The sport could also cut its carbon footstep by a small amount if there were more two-day meetings, thus allowing a trainer to transport runners for both days in one journey.

Where race-meetings on the flat could be cut would be to introduce April 1st as the earliest opening day of the turf season. Flat racing in March is tedius, especially if ground conditions are soft to heavy, with two-year-olds especially done harm racing on ground which to them must be like galloping in treacle. To my mind, the Lincoln, the most under-valued flat race of the season and in need of some love, should never to run before the date of the Aintree National. If this became the tradition it would provide a neat and tidy handover from jumps to the flat.

I am not one to encourage connections to stay over hurdles as I believe British hurdles to be inherently dangerous but until my radical view is seen to have merit, sheep hurdles remain the junior aspect of the sport and the Champion Hurdle as one of its blue ribands. Messrs Hobbs and White are in two minds whether to keep Sober Glory to hurdles next season with a view to targeting the Champion Hurdle or to go chasing, which was the original plan. As things stand, taking nothing away from Lossiemouth, the current champion, and with Sir Gino, pray to the heavens he is fit and healthy next season, likely to go back over fences, it is going to be a pretty weak division next season. If it were ever the time to keep a high-class young horse to hurdling, next season must be that time.

While Willie Mullins is a genius of the training ranks, his son is both a master with the pen and the stick. Perhaps Patrick is not a genius like his father, but as talented in and out of the saddle as anyone who presently both writes and rides. Today in the Racing Post, he has an account of his and Closutton's week at Cheltenham. His writing style, unpretentious yet on-the-money, is the equal of Alastair Down or Lord Oaksey or anyone else you might revere from the world of racing journalism. And today, to prove he recognises wisdom and poetry that fall from the lips of others, he begins his column with the sentiment of Ru Davies, owner of Road To Home, second to Ask Brewster in the Kim Muir. 'I think I have unlocked a new emotion that sits in a weird place between heartbroken and happy.'

As someone who ingloriously attempts to propel his views and sentiments into the world of others, reading Patrick Mullins leaves me in awe, yet happy, and a little bit heartbroken that my style and ability with the 'quill' is so far in arrears of P. Mullins that at times I feel that I should pull-up a fence too soon rather than a fence too late.